Sharon Salzberg Quotes

Continuing to listen and grow is important because we get into bad habits in relationships.

When you plant lettuce, if it does not grow well, you don't blame the lettuce. You look for reasons it is not doing well. It may need fertilizer, or more water, or less sun. You never blame the lettuce. Yet if we have problems with our friends or family, we blame the other person. But if we know how to take care of them, they will grow well, like the lettuce. Blaming has no positive effect at all, nor does trying to persuade using reason and arguments. That is my experience. No blame, no reasoning, no argument, just understanding.

Through your love for each other, through learning the art of making one person happy, you learn to express your love for the whole of humanity and all beings. Please help us develop the curriculum for the Institute for the Happiness of One Person. Don't wait until we open the school. You can begin practicing right away.

Millions of people are suffering: they want to be loved but they don't know how to love. And love cannot exist as a monologue; it is a dialogue, a very harmonious dialogue.

I hope it's enabling me to deal with another human being who's more important to me than I am.

The extent of your consciousness is limited only by your ability to love and to embrace with your love the space around you, and all it contains.

We do not exist for ourselves alone, and it is only when we are fully convinced of this fact that we begin to love ourselves properly and thus also love others.

Reading and discovering fiction has taught me how to empathise, understand falling in love and all those complex relationships that people have to deal with.

If I want to be a better person for whoever is in my life, I have to learn.

Compassion is the key to living outside the confines of your lower self.

We must begin to make what I call 'conscious choices', and to really recognize that we are the same. It's from that place in my heart that I write my songs.

In my mind, as long as I did what was right for me, I was cool. But that's not the way it works. You have to think about other people and take their feelings into account.

Love is but the discovery of ourselves in others, and the delight in the recognition.

I realized a while back that I have an innate ability to be compassionate, and I saw that the strength of compassion is something that healers have and healers use.'

As in all areas, we can improve how good we are at loving another person.

Being in relationship with others helps us know ourselves better.

The real hallmarks of humanity are: curiosity and an amazing ability to cooperate.

Say you want to be with someone, and you're doing something that they don't really like. They're gonna ask you to stop it, just for a moment to take a look at them, to see them clearly. That's what God wanted for me.

Compassion and love constitute non-violence in action. They are the source of all spiritual qualities: forgiveness, tolerance, all the virtues. They give meaning to our activities and makes them constructive. There is nothing amazing about being rich or highly educated; only when the individual has a warm heart do these attributes become worthwhile.

Love creates a communion with life. Love expands us, connects us, sweetens us, ennobles us. Love springs up in tender concern, it blossoms into caring action. It makes beauty out of all we touch. In any moment we can step beyond our small self and embrace each other as beloved parts of a whole.

You can only have as much love for yourself as you can express to others.

When I understand myself, I understand you, and out of that understanding comes love. Love is the missing factor; there is a lack of affection, of warmth in relationship; and because we lack that love, that tenderness, that generosity, that mercy in relationship, we escape into mass action which produces further confusion, further misery. We fill our hearts with blueprints for world reform and do not look to that one resolving factor which is love.

Be loving, and you will never want for love; be humble, and you will never want for guiding.

They say: 'If a man knew himself, he would know all mankind.' I say: 'If a man loved mankind, he would know something of himself.

Listening is where love begins: listening to ourselves and then to our neighbors.